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President-elect Donald Trump was named as TIME Magazine's 2024 Person of the Year on Thursday (December 12), discussing his election victory, multiple assassination attempts against him, the U.S. economy, his plans to deport millions of migrants, international affairs and a variety of other topics during an exclusive interview.
"Well, I think we ran a flawless campaign," Trump said. It was, it was really quite something. I called it 72 Days of Fury. There were no days off. There were no timeouts. If you made a mistake, it would be magnified at levels that nobody's ever seen before. So you couldn't make a mistake. And I think we just really ran well. It was a drive to go through it. It started 72 days out.
"For some reason, it just seemed to be it. And I worked very hard. I've been, I've been given credit by, actually, the reporters that followed me, because it was, you know, just, it just was all the time, every day, and we said the right things. We said things that were on the minds of the country.
"I think the Democrats didn't get it. They just kept going back to the same old nonsense. And it was nonsense, especially in where we are right now. And we hit—we hit something that was very special. We hit the nerve of the country. They don't want to see jails emptied out into our country. They don't want to see people from mental institutions being dismissed from their institutions."
Trump, 78, was reported to have a 54% approval rating and a 46% disapproval rating, which is higher than any point during his first term, Gallup reported in November, weeks after his election victory. The former president defeated Vice President Kamala Harris and became the first Republican candidate to win the popular vote in 20 years during the 2024 presidential election.
Trump won 312 electoral college votes, as well as all seven projected swing states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all of which he'd previously lost to Biden during the 2020 election.